Two words “Adolph Hitler”.
The politicians should be scared of this scenario more than anyone else. It will be open season on them and no one will shed tears when they die.
Cloward-Piven.....
two words “Karl Marx”
I don't know about that. In Hitler's case, the German economic collapse was largely due to the outside influence of the WWI reparations payments demanded by the French and the British.
[Side Note: There are those that claim that the US would have moderated this under Wilson, but he was affected by the 1918 Influenza outbreak and was largely incapacitated and ineffective during the critical parts of the reparations discussions. A bit difficult to believe, given the "progressive" tendencies of Wilson, but since the U.S. hadn't been subject to as much pain as our European "partners", there may be some merit to this.]
In the current scenario, any collapse here will be almost entirely our own (read: O-bambi, Senator Undertaker (D-NV) and the Wicked Witch of the West (MB-SF)).